The Shibuya Incident

After the autumn of 1945, the thirty-odd thousand Taiwanese still in Japan found themselves standing in a position with no name: no longer Japanese in law, not yet Chinese in fact. Food rations were issued by nationality, work and residence permits were granted by nationality, and their nationality was waiting on a peace treaty that had not been signed. Black markets grew in the burned-out districts of Tokyo and Osaka, where Taiwanese and Koreans kept stalls to survive, and the Japanese press began calling them "third-country people" — a term for those who were neither victors nor vanquished. On July 19, 1946, a group of Taiwanese on their way to the Shibuya police station to negotiate over stall crackdowns was ambushed en route; when the shooting stopped, several Taiwanese and one Japanese policeman were dead. That December a US Eighth Army military court closed the case: more than thirty Taiwanese were convicted, sentenced to prison and deportation, while the Japanese participants faced no comparable reckoning. For Taiwanese in Japan, the verdict answered the question that had hung over the whole year — in the occupation's classification scheme, they did not, in the end, count as nationals of a victorious power. When the news reached the island, the Min Pao and members of the provincial assembly spoke out one after another; it was the first time postwar Taiwanese society got angry, collectively, on behalf of its people abroad.